Creationism

This isn't really a frame rating. It is the first in a sister set of articles that I plan to do allowing progressives who are interested in frames to understand the frames their opponents are using and address them. My working title is "frame-busting", but I'll have to kick that around a bit more.

I learned this weekend that graduates from my college have been running tours that feature "Biblically Correct" teaching about evolution. I am quite discouraged. I'm fairly sure they had the same teachers I did, though we didn't graduate in the same year. And I know that my Old Testament teacher was fairly honest about the fact that there are 4 creation stories in the bible, that each features a radically different mode of creation, and that each story parallels creation stories in use among the non-Israelite tribes in the area where the books that contain them were written.

Here are the 4 stories:

1.) Creation out of nothing - This is the Genesis 1 story. There wasn't anything, God spoke, and then there was something.
2.) Creation out of something - This is the Genesis 2 story featuring the 7 days. There is something, God divides darkness and light. God divides the light into the greater and lesser lights. God divides the waters, and then the animals. It is generally taught that these two are two faces of the same story, but the first one is relentlessly ex nihilo, and the second always presumes there was something before.

3.) God as architect - In Job, God is described as an architect, measuring out the world, setting firm foundations and building the world on top of that. We dismiss it today as figurative, but remember the problems Galileo and Copernicous had convincing people that Earth was a floating ball in space? This is the reason.

4.) The Rahab problem - So, Rahab was this good natured prostitute in the land of Canaan who hid the spies of the invading Israeli army when the cops came knocking. She's generally counted as one of the faithful. But that doesn't account for the half dozen or so verses that talk about God killing Rahab. It turns out there are two Rahabs. The other one... the one God killed... comes from a creation story in the ancient near east where the world is formed out of the body of a giant monster named Rahab.

So, guys? Which true Biblical creation story are you preaching? Are you preaching all of them? If not, how did you come to the decision that one was true truth above the others? Is there a chance you used scientific observation to rule out a couple of them? If so, how then do you justify ignoring scientific observation when it comes to your favorite?

Now, I do understand that Christian college makes you come to a decision on a lot of matters and they reward you if you come to the right decision and punish you if you come to the wrong one. In my science class, we were assigned a paper on creationism vs. evolution and the instructor expected us to pick. I didn't. What we get in the bible is a mythological representation of God creating. It was the best we had at the time. Evolution is the best sense we can make of what we have today. I believe that God was/is behind that. For me, evolution and my faith can coexist.

I got a B on that paper... and the teacher told me that it was because she knew I'd written a good paper but she didn't get what I was arguing. Oh well.